Gordion is frequently remembered as the location of an intricate
knot ultimately cut by Alexander, but in antiquity it served as the
center of the Phrygian kingdom that ruled much of Asia Minor during
the early millennium B.C.E. The site lies approximately seventy
kilometers southeast of Ankara in central Turkey, at the
intersection of the great empires of the East (Assyrians,
Babylonians, and Hittites) and the West (Greeks and Romans).
Consequently, it occupied a strategic position on nearly all trade
routes that linked the Mediterranean and the Near East. The
University of Pennsylvania has been excavating at Gordion since
1950, unearthing a wide range of discoveries that span nearly four
millennia. The vast majority of these artifacts attests to the
city's interactions with the other great kingdoms and city states
of the Near East during the Iron Age and Archaic periods (ca.
950-540 B.C.E.), especially Assyria, Urartu, Persia, Lydia, Greece,
and the Neo-Hittite city-states of North Syria, among others.
Gordion is thus the ideal centerpiece of an exhibition dealing with
Anatolia and its neighbors during the first millennium B.C.E.
Through a special agreement signed between the Republic of Turkey
and the University of Pennsylvania, Turkey has loaned the Penn
Museum more than one hundred artifacts gathered from four museums
in Turkey (Ankara, Gordion, Istanbul, and Antalya) for an
exhibition titled The Golden Age of King Midas. The exhibition
features most of the material recovered in Tumulus MM, or the
"Midas Mound" (ca. 740 B.C.E.), which was the burial site of King
Midas's father, as well as a number of objects found in a series of
Lydian tombs. The Turkish loan has made possible a uniquely
comprehensive and elaborate exhibition that also features a
disparate group of rarely seen objects from the Penn Museum's own
collections, particularly from sites in the Ukraine, Iran, Iraq,
Turkey, and Greece. With the historic King Midas (ca. 740-700
B.C.E.) as its guiding theme, the exhibition illuminates the
relationships Phrygia maintained with Lydia, Persia, Assyria, and
Greece. The accompanying catalog includes full-color illustrations
and essays that expound on the sites and objects of the exhibition.
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